40 Day Contemplative Lenten Challenge - Introduction

Lent is an opportunity to bring oneself closer to God. The first stage of a Christian’s spiritual journey is to begin a process of “Purgation,” which simply means you begin a process of getting rid of your sinful tendencies and habits, and instead replacing these with the practice of Christian virtues. You also begin a process of detaching yourself from temporal things and attaching yourself more firmly to God. Lent is a time, as we prepare for Easter morning, to take the opportunity to pray, fast, and to reflect on our current spiritual state. It is a time to begin a process to change things up spiritually, to come out of our comfort zones, so that we can bring ourselves into greater union with God in preparation to receive the Resurrected Jesus more fully on Easter morning.

What is the 40 Day Contemplative Lenten Challenge? Simply put, it is an opportunity to help you use meditative prayer and prayer time spent in silence, along with fasting and abstinence, to assist you in preparing yourself spiritually to receive the Risen Christ with joy and peace on Easter Morning. Our 40 Day challenge will run from March 6
th, Ash Wednesday, until April 20
th, Holy Saturday. Easter falls on April 21
st this year. Following the Church’s Lenten tradition, Sundays are not counted as fasting days.

Participants who use the 40 Day Contemplative Challenge to help them to prepare for Easter will be encouraged to combine silent prayer, fasting or abstinence to prepare for Easter. Fridays, during Lent are traditional fast days, and if you are able to fast, these are days when you may choose to limit what you eat and drink to bread and water. You do not have to fast only eating bread and drinking water, particularly if there are health reasons for you not to. Fasting can also occur when one chooses to simply eat vegetables for one’s three meals, or limit what one eats to only peanut butter and bread. Fasting from food and drink in both variety and amount provides a means for you to exercise your will in a way that strengthens you, not only mentally, but spiritually. It does this by virtue of your exorcising mental control of your physical needs. As you adhere to your choices concerning what you eat and drink and the amount you eat and drink, you strengthen yourself mentally and spiritually. As you avoid eating or drinking certain things, there is some small measure of suffering that you bear, but by sticking to what you have chosen to do, you strengthen your will power as you stay on your fast. To gain maximum mental and spiritual benefit from the fasting you do, you should offer your fasting up as a prayer.

Fasting using bread and water only, or eating only a small portion of peanut butter on bread are only suggestions. There are many ways to fast and abstain from food and drink and the other worldly pleasures that are beneficial ways of strengthening your will power. You just have to choose something that will work for you. Fasting also helps to raise one’s ability to resist temptations by virtue of the strength of character one gains by making efforts to forego eating and drinking. Abstinence works similarly in that by forgoing certain favorite foods and drinks, or limiting the amount of food you eat and liquids you drink, you help yourself build up your strength to resist temptations and to control your bodily urges.

Fasting from Use of Electronic Media All participants to the 40 Day Contemplative Challenge are encouraged to fast from watching TV. Also, participants are encouraged to fast from using your computers, iPad, and phones, particularly to play games, watch videos, or use unnecessary apps. Use of social media is also something we encourage you give up or limit. Avoidance of these forms of electronic media will not be easy, but it is encouraged because for the most part these are attention grabbers and time sinks that pull folks away from being present in the current moment. Electronic media focuses one’s attention on the demands placed on you, not only by the apps that send you notifications to encourage you to use them, but also by people who are not who you have currently in front of you. Watching TV, for instance, focuses your attention away from the other people in the room. Limiting the time you use electronic media will help you embrace silence and encourage prayer. The 40 Day Contemplative Challenge has as one of its prayer goals to encourage the participants to have an encounter with the Living God, and while no one knows when or if this will come, we hope you will use your silent time away from electronic media as a means of encouraging a big return in your feeling closer to God.

Meditative, Silent, and Contemplative Prayer As far as prayer: Our 40 Contemplative Challenge is centered mostly in prayer, and we encourage folks to pray the Rosary on a daily basis. But the purpose of our daily reflections is to encourage participants to embrace using meditative prayer, as well as spending some time each day in silent or contemplative prayer. What we mean by spending time in silent prayer is simply this – spending time sitting prayerfully in silence. Time in silent prayer is for most people a necessary prelude to contemplative prayer, which is gift from God. Prayerful time spent in the silence of your heart is one sure way to help you train your mind and your heart to encounter the Presence of God. God comes in the silence of your heart, but you are less likely to notice our silent God if you do not make a concerted regular effort silently wait for Him.

Meditative prayer is something that you do. You focus your mind on a Scriptural scene like being present at the foot of the cross, and in that sense, you train your mind to focus on what you want it to focus on. Meditative prayer also uses silence and it helps one’s mind and heart to embrace silence as a means of praying. It is a doorway that can help one move into silent mental or Contemplative prayer.

Sitting in prayer in the silence of your heart is very difficult, for our minds are made to think. Thinking thoughts is what our mind is made for, and a typical experience for anyone new to silent prayer is to not experience anything like silence. Instead the busyness of their own thoughts captivates them and they are carried off by the chores they know they have to complete or the insult that they experienced that morning. These thoughts bounce around pulling one’s attention away from prayer and resting in silence and realizing God’s Presence. Meditative prayer helps us learn to shift the focus in our mind away from the random thoughts that try to carry us off from our intended purpose in prayer, as we use our imagination to enliven our attention to the Presence of God around and in us. Training and controlling our imaginations are very important to any Christian intent on putting on the mind of Christ, for the imagination is the main battlefield of any spiritual journey. It is in our imaginations where temptations gain their power and it is in our imaginations where sin blooms in all its stained glory. For most of us meditative prayer is a necessary step in surrendering our deep-seeded focus on the world around us, and instead turn our attention inward to our center and towards God. Keeping a portion of our attention at our center helps us realize God’s Presence. Using meditative prayer helps us to train our imagination by focusing it in prayer on holy images and thoughts. This type of focus helps give us a very important measure of control over our imagination, which is a powerful playground for temptation. As one gains greater measures of control over one’s imagination, one begins to have a means of controlling their passions, and meditative prayer strengthens us in ways that not only make temptations less effective, but also helps us to embrace silence, so that we can better hear our God Who speaks to us in the silence of our hearts.

Over the 40 days of Lent, we hope and pray that you will use the reflections as an aid to your preparation for Easter. We also hope and pray that through the process of using the combination of vocal and meditative prayer, along with time spent in silent or contemplative prayer, that you will build a habit of prayer that incorporates in your prayer life time spent in the silence of your heart listening for God’s voice, and that in so doing, you will be brought closer to God.